‘They’re too small,’ I say. ‘You can only see them with a microscope.’

‘You could give them a little wave before you flush, though,’ says Kat. ‘Just in case they can see you.’

‘And eating them will mean I won’t turn into one of those?’ Karim points at the swarm outside.

Mak goes in for a second brownie. ‘I don’t know for sure, but there’s a good chance they’ll prevent the spores from taking over your body.’

‘Not fair, I want one,’ Trent calls again, and by this point we don’t even bother responding to him. 268

‘And they don’t die when you cook them?’

‘They can withstand extremes of temperature,’ I say. ‘They can even survive in space.’

‘Tardigrades.’ Karim takes another bite of brownie. ‘Who knew?’

I’ve been trying not to clock-watch, or keep working out where on her journey Ade will be, but it’s hard. If she succeeds, and my theory is correct, we should know about it pretty much straight away. I don’t want to think about what will happen if she doesn’t make it.

A rock hits the panel of glass closest to me. It doesn’t hit with as much force as some of the others have, so there’s no loud thud, but it hits in a way that causes more damage. I hear a sharp cracking sound, and see a pea-sized crater in the glass.

‘We’d better get ready,’ Mak says. ‘They have a weakness now. It won’t take long to spread.’

So we swallow our brownies and pull on our backpacks, tightening the straps so that they fit securely against our bodies. We re-tie our shoelaces and Kat puts her hair in a ponytail. Karim does some lunges, which makes us all laugh. ‘For the jogging,’ he says. And then there’s nothing to do but wait. 269

The bugs are concentrated around the damaged glass, hitting it with rocks, branches and their mandibles. Cracks start to splinter out from the hole. We back towards the entrance to the Tail – it has a shutter that we can close after us to buy us some more time. Chets is still frozen, his stinger wedged into the wall, his mandibles wide and his mouth open. I can hear the microwave churning on in the kitchen – something else that should keep the bugs at bay for a short while, until they find a way around it.

The bug that was Mrs McAllister has the point of her gnarly mandible inside the hole in the glass, working away at it, wrenching and pulling, with her hands and feet planted on the glass to give her purchase. I hear the crack as a chunk of glass finally gives way. It’s like breaking the surface of a frozen puddle. A shard the size of my hand comes away, followed by another, even bigger piece.